Latest Research

Today's digital experiences — including mobile messages — place too much cognitive load on consumers. The effectiveness of mobile messages depends on both the use case and the content. Consumers will turn off poor experiences very quickly. Future experiences will be right-sized, highly contextual, and dynamically assembled. Today's mobile messages or notifications are the precursor to these experiences. Mobile messaging product managers must master the art of notifications.

The most common question Forrester's clients ask about mobile messaging is, "Who does it well?" The second most popular question is, "What are my competitors doing?" Digital business leaders will find answers to both questions here. The PPT tool in the download box at the beginning of the report offers more than 70 examples of mobile messages and rates the quality of mobile messages for 17 attributes such as use of graphics, tone, clarity of language, and more. We'll continue to update this as we find more examples and technology evolves.

Notifications simplify experiences for consumers by allowing brands to push out text, images, files, app fragments, and more based on real-time context. However, the only fully interoperable messaging available today is SMS, which has limited functionality, compared with platforms such as Apple's iMessage or Facebook's Messenger. Google is pursuing a fully interoperable standard in rich communication service (RCS), which would offer a comparable feature set, but many obstacles stand in its way. This report outlines the potential of RCS for digital business professionals.

Digital business professionals can learn how to master notifications in part by benchmarking competitors and other leaders. A pure "monkey see, monkey do" philosophy will fall short. Digital business professionals must put processes, people, and technology in place to build their own best practices to win in customers' moments with notifications.

The role of emotion in customer experience (CX) is long proven. Positive emotions improve CX, driving revenue growth; negative emotions do the opposite. Given this and the fact that many experiences today are digital, clients often ask us what digital triggers of specific emotions look like. To make the idea of digital interactions triggering emotions more tangible for CX professionals, this report showcases examples from websites and apps that evoke the top emotions that influence CX globally.